Counting bodies, preventing war: Future conflict and the ethics of fatality numbers

Rodehau-Noack, Johanna

doi:10.1177/13691481231183880

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…[ 38 , 39 ] argue that good quantification is important yet inadequate to the task of illuminating the horror of warfare. They advocate telling the stories of the many individual victims who lie beneath the abstract numbers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hopefully, the field of war-death estimation will move toward greater transparency in the future so that more work along the lines of the present paper will be possible. [38,39] argue that good quantification is important yet inadequate to the task of illuminating the horror of warfare. They advocate telling the stories of the many individual victims who lie beneath the abstract numbers.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

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The violent death toll from the Iraq War: 2003–2023

Spagat

2024

PLoS ONE

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From the beginning of the Iraq war, in March of 2003, to the present day, controversy has swirled around the death toll of the war. This paper narrows down the range of uncertainty for the numbers and trends in violent deaths in the war. I assemble and appraise all primary sources that cover the period from March of 2003 onwards—six sample surveys plus a casualty recording project (Iraq Body Count [IBC]). Data permitting, I present cumulative monthly figures with, for the surveys, 95% bootstrapped uncertainty intervals. The analysis uncovers a core of high-quality mainstream sources that are highly consistent with each another. In addition, there are three outlier surveys that are compromised by serious flaws and produce estimates far outside the mainstream. Discarding the outlying and flawed surveys reveals a clear picture of the violent death toll from the Iraq war. IBC figures, extended to include combatants, occupy a central position within the mainstream range of estimates. The strong consistency across the high-quality sources provides a rare validation of three war-death-measurement methodologies—household-based surveys, sibling-based surveys, and casualty recording. Methodological success notwithstanding, we must transcend the numbers to truly comprehend the human costs of the war.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

The violent death toll from the Iraq War: 2003–2023

Spagat

2024

PLoS ONE

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The politics of descriptive inference: contested concepts in conflict data

Broache,

2024

Int Polit

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Descriptive research is sometimes understood as simply compiling and presenting objective facts, or ‘telling it like it is.’ We challenge this understanding, arguing that description involves a series of subjective, value-laden decisions that may reflect, reinforce, or alternatively undermine, existing narratives and power structures; accordingly, description is fundamentally, and unavoidably, political. We illustrate this argument with respect to descriptive research on violence against civilians by comparing how three descriptive research outputs—the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s One-Sided Violence, the Political Instability Task Force’s Genocide and Politicide, and the Targeted Mass Killings datasets—define contested concepts relating to the distinction between combatants and civilians, identification of state actors, and intent. We demonstrate how differences in these definitions manifest in different descriptive inferences about violence in Burundi in 1993, and we discuss how an understanding of description as political relates to researchers’ responsibilities as compilers and users of descriptive data.

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Pacifism, the Science of Peace, and the Constitution of War as a Governance Problem

Rodehau-Noack

2024

Global Studies Quarterly

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Conflict prevention is a core item on the agenda of major international organizations and fora. In this article, I trace how war became a problem accessible to international governance. Adopting an object-centered approach to international relations (O-IR), I argue that war’s constitution as a problem of international governance unfolded in three interrelated processes. Firstly, pacifists and philanthropists designated war as a scientific object, thus giving rise to a “science of peace.” Secondly, scholars and pacifists compiled statistics on war, thus translating it across contexts and representing it as a global phenomenon. Statistics helped to make war accessible to advocacy and policymaking as an object of expertise. Thirdly, peace advocates problematized war as a governance object by representing it as a cost-benefit problem and a major cause in the reversal of economic development. By tracing the historical development of war as an epistemic object that can be investigated systematically, an object of expertise that can be measured and compared, and an object of governance that can be manipulated, this article bridges the strands of O-IR that have previously only focused on either knowledge and expertise or governance. Further, it adds to peace and conflict scholarship by providing an intellectual history of the prevention idea and its entanglement with modernism. Finally, it advances broader IR scholarship by offering an analysis of the role of scientific developments and nonstate activism in producing ideas and enabling policy agendas.

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Counting bodies, preventing war: Future conflict and the ethics of fatality numbers

Cited by 4 publications

References 67 publications

The violent death toll from the Iraq War: 2003–2023

The violent death toll from the Iraq War: 2003–2023

The politics of descriptive inference: contested concepts in conflict data

Pacifism, the Science of Peace, and the Constitution of War as a Governance Problem

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